Under traditional presence platforms presence information is transported using a presence information data format (PIDF) in traditional SIP/SIMPLE presence. The PIDF format is rigid and set by the internet engineering task force (IETF) standards body.
Communication of presence information data between a watcher and a presence server is verbose. Specifically, raw data is passed to the watcher to allow the watcher to derive various presence aspects. This requires a significant amount of “over the air” traffic.
The use of raw data to derive presence aspects by a watcher, can be problematic since the computation is non-trivial and therefore various watchers can interpret the raw data differently, which can lead to erroneous conclusions on behalf of a watcher client or consumer.
Similar to presence servers, location servers or other generic servers (i.e. generic information servers or data sources) could be configured such that a watcher will derive location or generic aspects from raw data, which causes significant over the air communications and compatibility issues.